I’m posting twice today. I’m not sure if that’s proper SEO-fu, but I don’t really give a shit. I figure this has to be done.

In the previous post I talked about how I felt like I was falling off the wagon with all of the various life changes I’m trying to affect.

It was so bad that I missed last Friday’s weekly update. I knew I missed it. I was going to just ignore it. Then I said “fuck it” and decided I needed to post an update.

Consider this Tabula Rasa, a blank slate, so I can move forward with a fresh start.

Regent of Aldun

My first novel, my baby, was on a bit of a hiatus for the last two weeks. There are various excuses I could throw out excuses as to why I didn’t write anything, but they’re all bullshit.

There are no good excuses.

I wanted an accurate word count as I go forward, and I found out I was way off on my average word count per page. That throws off my daily word count estimate, which in turn throws off my total word count.

I took an average word count of 10 handwritten lines and came up with an average of 9.4 words per line. The notebook I’m writing in has 24 lines per page. That gives an average of around 225 words per page.

I don’t know where in the hell I got 400.

As of this morning the first draft is 114 pages long. At 225 words per page that gives a word count of 25,650, right around half of where I thought I was.

But that’s 25,650 words that didn’t exist before I wrote them.

Even though I felt like a failure the last couple of weeks, I now know that I couldn’t have failed if I hadn’t started. And THAT fires me up.

The Blog

I didn’t keep good track of the daily word count for the blog over the last two weeks, which is OK because I didn’t really write a whole lot.

What I did write was kind of slapped together and for that I apologize.

The first article I wrote today was around 1300 words, which I wrote in about an hour.

This article is at about 400 words right now and I’ll come back up here and update the final wordcount and time when I finish.

Which, for those nerds reading this (you know who you are) is tough to do because the word count will be changing while I’m writing the word count sentence…

RECURSIVE REFERENCE WARNING

This article is 990 words long in roughly 40 minutes of writing.

For the blog today that gives me a total word count of 2240 in an hour and forty minutes for a speed of 1341 words per hour.

Social Media

I’m writing a novel mostly because I have to. I started this blog as a way to get my thoughts out there. But, frankly, my motives aren’t completely altruistic.

I want my words to get out into the world. Eventually, I would like to sell them. In order to do that I have to get them in front of people.

I took some time last week working on my social media presence. Honestly, it was mostly dicking around, but it was stuff that, looking back, I would’ve had to do anyway.

Social media is the best way to reach the greatest amount of people in the shortest amount of time.

I spent some time to align all of my various, existing social media accounts to the brand I’d like to create.

I didn’t keep close track of the time I spent on it, but look for that in the future.

The Super Secret Project

I didn’t actually write any of the new project over the last two weeks.

While I was out of town I did spend a lot of time brainstorming and creating beat sheets for it. I’m not ready to reveal details yet, not even the title, but I can say it will be a serial.

I’m going to go over my brainstorming/planning process after I officially announce the project, but know that while I’m pantsing the hell out of the novel this one will be planned out well in advance.

For instance, I know right now that the first season of the serial will be six episodes each containing ten, 2,500 word chapters.

That will give the complete season a length of about 150,000 words.

Life Stuff

Because this isn’t strictly a writing blog (hell, it’s barely a writing blog at all) I want to toss out an update for the other stuff in my life that I’ve talked about.

I mentioned quitting smoking. Today would be day 28. It fucking sucks, but I’m going strong.

In the earlier article today I also mentioned that I take cold showers a la Joel Runyon. I honestly haven’t taken hot shower since we bought our home in Ohio, 61 days ago. I take cold showers and love every single one of them.

I also mentioned elsewhere that I’m working on losing weight. To do this my wife an I have adopted a paleo diet. I actually like it. Anything that lets you have bacon regularly is fine by me. The problem is we’ve been cheating. A lot.

Still, as a baseline, I currently weigh 342 pounds. How many internet writers will tell you that?

In Summary

I’ve been toying around with various ways to summarize these updates. I’m thinking eventually some sort of spreadsheet might be best, but there just isn’t enough data to build one right now. So, for now, a boring ass list:

• Regent of Aldun: 25,650 words (+822 words)
• New Project: 7,500 words (+0 words)
• BradPeirson.com: ~2,500 words (today only)
• Non-smoking: 28 days
• Cold showerd: 61 days

It’s ugly, but there she is. I’m going work on coming up with a better progress report format after this post goes up.

And I’m off to update the word count up above…

photo credit: creative.paradox via photopin cc